This is an extended book review essay considering Christian Abrahamsson’s impressive 2018 monograph Topoi/Graphein: Mapping the Middle in Spatial Thought. It argues that, rather than addressing ‘a geography of position’, this work explores ‘a geography of preposition’, showing how topographies of position (of identities, peoples and places in the world) are always inextricably shaped by topologies of preposition, elsewhere termed ‘the shapes of thought’. The essay inquires into the intellectual framings of this ‘prepositional geophilosophy’, noting what it owes to Gunnar Olsson, the Swedish geographer, but also suggesting that its most distinctive moves are prompted by Michel Serres, the French philosopher. The abstract geometries of Olsson and the patchwork topologies of Serres mark complementary, if occasionally tensioned, ‘passages’ into the prepositional landscapes that Abrahamsson navigates through topoi (‘topics’) subjected to his graphein (‘writing’). The essay emphasizes the scholarly and ethico-political significance of this compelling new addition to the literature of human geography and related fields.
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Chris Philo (2020) studied this question.
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